Tracking

Saturday:

For the week or so when I was writing down everything I ate (without weighing or measuring anything except carbs, but jotting it all down anyway) and then testing my blood four times a day, my weight kept going down. Then I stopped writing it down or testing my blood, just counting carbs in my head. And my weight started to creep up again! A small gain on four days out of five. Yesterday I wrote things down again -- including a big lunch at a Chinese restaurant, where I had the tiniest scoop of rice to soak up the sauces but otherwise all meat and vegetables -- and my weight went down again ...

So what am I doing differently when I write things down?

I think one big difference is between-snack snacking. When I was testing my blood, I had to wait two hours after a meal before I could test. I couldn't eat in that period because it would throw off the results. Sometimes I wanted a little something an hour or so after a meal, but I couldn't have it. When I stopped testing my blood, that restriction was gone. If I felt like a piece of chocolate an hour after a meal, I had it. It's just a piece of chocolate, right? Today I had a spicy lunch, and a while afterwards I started craving something sweet. Chocolate, or an orange, or a cup of tea (I still have 3/4 tsp low-GI sugar in my tea). But I had wanted to check that the lunch was ok, I was having a noodle soup with only half the noodles and lots of bean sprouts and other vegetables instead. I was a bit worried about those noddles. Turned out it was fine, 6.7 mmol/L. But in those two hours I really noticed how much I wanted a little taste of something sweet. And if, in the past, I had given in to that craving regularly; it would all add up to quite a bit.

You would think three meals plus three snacks, eating up to every two hours, would be enough! I've gone back to writing everything down. I'm not testing my blood very often, just after things like the Chinese food or the noodles to make sure I am still going ok. But I'm writing it down to be fully conscious about what I am eating and when.

Another difference is I was making sure I was having at least six glasses of fluid a day, and writing that down too. When I stopped writing it, I think I stopped drinking as much. Yesterday I had my six glasses, spread evenly throughout the day. And got up at least four times in the night to pee. Sigh. My body seems to get used to the extra liquid pretty quickly, but then forgets again just as quickly. A couple of days of drinking enough and I'll be fine through the night again.

The moral of the story is I need to track.